I write about business and regulatory aspects of blockchain and crypto

A swimming pool is fed by underwater jets at the Siwa Shali Resort in Siwa, Egypt, on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008. Located in the Libyan Desert Egypt's Siwa Oasis is home to one of the Middle East's most ancient settlements. Photographer: Dana Smillie/Bloomberg News

A new smart contract platform arising out of the University of California-Berkeley computer science department has raised $45 million from an all-star lineup of crypto funds and investors.

Oasis Labs, founded by Dawn Song - a computer science professor and researcher at Berkeley, announced Monday the capital raise from investors including a16z crypto - the new Andreesen Horowitz crypto-focused fund, Binance, Accel, Pantera, Polychain and Bitmain - the Chinese hardware behemoth.

The company is building an open-source platform for smart contract applications that aspires to conquer two of the thorniest issues that currently plague the blockchain community: lack of data confidentiality and scalability.

“Many [blockchain] developers and organizations have understandable concerns about performance and privacy limitations that are currently hindering their ability to embrace the technology,” explained Song, who holds a Ph.D from Berkeley and has spent her career at the nexus of distributed systems, blockchain and smart contracts, applied cryptography and machine learning.

No strangers to the field, Song and her team of computer scientists, privacy and artificial intelligence experts were previously involved in advanced privacy-preserving computing endeavors, including open-source projects with Uber, the rideshare company, and MIT.

Now, they are seeking to apply that knowledge to the blockchain arena with the introduction of Ekiden, an open source platform that uses so-called trusted execution environments - such as Intel SGX - to facilitate off-chain execution of smart contracts in a manner that offers better performance, lower cost and improved data privacy over current alternatives.

The upshot is that the combination of improved data privacy and processing capabilities will open the door for more computationally-intensive processes, like machine learning applications, to be programmed into smart contract applications.

Critically, Song argues that no current technology is sufficient to both protect the privacy of users’ data and enable application developers to conduct advanced analytics with that data using processes such as machine learning:

“It’s two sides of same problem. We lack technology to protect users’ privacy while at the same time allowing users to benefit from applications and services that utilize that data.”

Such a breakthrough would effectuate a chink in the armor of current siloed systems that prevent data from being utilized and analyzed to its full societal benefit.

“In the long run, we hope our blockchain platform can democratize AI,” she explained, noting that Oasis’s privacy-preserving smart contracts would codify the specifics around how data can be used once it is uploaded by a user.

This would open the door for more data sets - even sensitive data such as personally identifiable information - to be used in AI applications, for example, without jeopardizing the owner’s identity and eliminating the possibility of data being recycled for unauthorized purposes.

“The Oasis platform aims to give users control over their data, and at the same time deliver superior performance and privacy capabilities. Our goal is to build the scalable and secure decentralized internet that puts users first,” Song said, adding:

“What we provide is the privacy-preserving smart contracts that can enforce privacy requirements, and at the same time provide the incentive for users to contribute data as well.”

That formula was enough to garner attention and interest from the throng of top-tier investors.

“Oasis Labs is forging a new path by giving people control over their data while delivering a high-performance blockchain platform that will reshape the future of the cloud,” said Jake Flomenberg, a partner at Accel.

"It's exciting to see talented people like Dawn and her team working on ways to transition the internet away from data silos and towards a world with more responsible ways to share and own your data," said Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and Oasis Labs investor.

With the completion of its capital raise, Oasis Labs is seeking developers interested in applying for its testnet.

The initial funds were raised through a private placement of tokens, and nodes on the network will receive tokens in exchange for verifying transactions and securing the blockchain once it is live.

Song emphasized that several recent postings by initial coin offering review sites indicating that Oasis had pulled the plug on its public token sale were incorrect. “We never planned to do an ICO,” she said.

I am a journalist and strategic communications professional in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. I previously served as Washington correspondent at CoinDesk, where I covered the business applications and legal and regulatory aspects of blockchain technology and crypto...